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Get paid to be a digital tour guide

Yodio lets users combine audio with digital photo files and sell them or share them for free with a community.

Erica Ogg Former Staff writer, CNET News
Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur.
Erica Ogg
2 min read

An early leader in the "name soon-to-be a verb a la Google and TiVo" category here at Demo '07 is Yodio, an audio-publishing system to produce and send audio with digital photos.

After three and a half years of development, the Seattle-based Yodio (short for "your audio") is being unveiled in the next hour here at Demo 07. It works like this: take a digital photo, call Yodio's toll-free number, and record a message (but keep it under two minutes). Yodio syncs the MP3 file with your photo, which then can be sent to anyone for free. Google ads are tacked on based on however you tagged your photo.

To take it a step further, you can record audio over multiple photos as a narrated slide show. Yodio is social in the sense that in the community section of the site you can decide who can or can't see your narrated photos. Or, as another option, you can charge for access to your photos.

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Wait, what? Who wants to--hypothetically--see the narrated photo album of my new (and, of course, tastefully decorated) apartment I made for my out-of-town friends to see? Well, hopefully no one. But there is the chance that an expert traveler could create a really slick audio/photo travel guide for download to an MP3 player. I might pay for that if it were good. That's why Yodio says it allows the community to rank content providers, so you have an idea what kind of content you're buying.

Users can store as much content as they want, and can set the price themselves, which is entirely optional.

Travel is the killer app, Yodio says, but it also pictures applications like self-help guides, online sermons or educational guides.